Tuesday Teachings - Summer Learning

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Most schools are out or getting ready to let out here in the United States and kids can not wait for summer vacation. As a child, I remember the excitement and thrill I felt when it was time to finally put away the textbooks and pencils; it was time to run, play and be free! Kids need that time to just be kids but summer vacation is also no time to just forget everything they learned in the past school year.

You can give your child numerous opportunities to continue learning over summer vacation without them even realizing it.

Cook together - Let your child pick out a new recipe to try and then take them to the store to purchase all of the ingredients. This gives them opportunities to work on reading (recipes and food labels), writing (grocery list), math (measuring ingredients and timing meal) and is a great activity to do together. Research shows that when kids are involved in selecting and preparing food they take ownership of the meal and are more likely to not only try the food but to also enjoy the food.

Garden together - Go to a local garden center and give your child a set amount of money. They can then select several plants to grow in your yard or in pots. This works on math skills (spending money and spacing plants), nurturing skills (caring for the plants)and then recipes and cooking skills.

Scavenger Hunts - See our blog post of 6/4/10 for a great scavenger hunt in the grocery store and we are hoping to give another scavenger hunt sheet for the great outdoors in the next week or so. This is a great skill for kids to teach them to focus, pay attention, search and read.

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Public Libraries - Our local library kicks off their summer reading program on 6/1/11. The theme this summer is One World, Many Stories. We have participated in the summer reading program every year. It is cheap, challenging entertainment that encourages literacy making it a win-win for everyone!

Art Camp - No need to pay expensive camp fees. Get together with some of your friends and organize a camp for the kids. Each day the kids can rotate the house they go to and each parent would be responsible for one day of camp. If you need some great art ideas check out Pink and Green Mama's blog for some great ideas and e-books on outdoor arts.

Make homemade art supplies - see our blog posts for Cinnamon Applesauce Ornaments, play dough, Chalk Paint, and Surprise Soap.

In addition the the activities listed above, also remember that "Playing is Learning"! Have a great summer!

June Calendar

Here is the Family Fun Calendar for June 2011.

Memorial Day

Happy Memorial Day! Hope everyone has a great extended week-end. Here is a link to U.S. Memorial Day History.

The Very Hungry Caterpillar

I am lucky that my son still enjoys one of my favorite books, "The Hungry Caterpillar". We read it again this week and then we decided to make some butterflies of our own.

Supplies:
Coffee filters
washable markers
water
pipe cleaners/chenille stems
Blow dryer - if you are as impatient as we are

Use the markers to color your coffee filters. There is no need to color it entirely, unless you want to. Once you are done coloring, spray water on the filter just until it flattens out, do not saturate the filter. This will allow the color from the markers to bleed and mix.

If you are impatient, use the blow dryer to dry the filters.

Once dry, smoosh the center of the filter and wrap the pipe cleaner around it, bending the ends to resemble antennae.

See our other book and craft ideas below:
Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs
The Grouchy Ladybug

Enjoy!

Farm Study

In preschool they have been talking about farms and my parents have a farm. My son loves to go to his grandparent's house and ride the tractor and check on the cows so this is a fun unit for him. We decided to extend this study a bit with a project at home.

I made play dough for us in green and blue. I used my standard recipe of:
1 cup All Purpose Flour
1 cup Water
1 tbsp Cream of Tarter
1 tbsp Vegetable Oil
1/4 cup Salt
Food Coloring

Add all ingredients except food coloring to a pan and heat over medium heat until the dough forms a ball. Once it forms a ball, remove to a wax paper lined counter and knead until consistency feels correct. Seperate into the number of colors you want and add each color seperately. Knead well.

Once we had the blue and green dough we took one of our art trays and covered the tray with predominantly green dough for the grass and then added blue on for a pond and stream. Once the farm was ready, we added on our farm animals and played farmer.

Making Puffy Paint

I have seen many blogs making homemade puffy paint and we decided to give it a try this week. We used the recipe from Pocketful of Posies The only materials we needed were tablespoon, containers, flour, salt, water, food coloring, cardboard and microwave.


For each color of paint you will put 1 tbsp. flour, 1 tbsp. salt and 1 tbsp. of water in a container and add 10 drops of food coloring. Mix well. Repeat for each color. We originally made lime green, blue and red. We used a spoon to drop this onto the back of an empty food box and then swirled it around with the spoon.

Next, put the cardboard in the microwave on high for 15 second increments until it dries. It took our first picture 1 minute 15 seconds to dry.

Once we had completed that we decided to make another painting but thought we would just use blue and green and would make Earth. I really liked this one. We put the blue paint on the cardboard and used the spoon to spread it out into a round shape. Next, we drizzled the green paint on. We then put this in the microwave in 15 second increments. I took this out before the center was completely dry as I wanted to see how it would look if we just let it dry naturally, would it still puff? It was still puffy but not nearly as much as the areas that were dried by the microwave.